Henry Rollins: Teeing Off: Help Yourself to Self Help

I thought this opin­ion arti­cle was great…

Henry Rollins: Tee­ing Off: Help Your­self to Self Help
from The Huff­in­g­ton Post

I can still remem­ber my mother com­ing back to our apart­ment after one of her marathon Erhard Sem­i­nar Train­ing, oth­er­wise known as EST, week­ends and exclaim­ing such cultish bull­shit as, “Be here now!” “You’re an ass­hole!” Well, she got it half right but I remem­ber won­der­ing what grave mis­for­tune befell adults to send them run­ning herd-like into hotel ball­rooms, pay out­ra­geous sums of money to sit in fold­ing chairs and be told for hours, by some­one they had never met, how badly they were fuck­ing up their lives. This group cry was clas­si­fied as self-help. Why you had to do it together with hun­dreds of other peo­ple was beyond me but it made my mother happy in a slightly dis­turb­ing waiting-to-be-beamed up kind of way, so what the hell? Self-help books, CDs, shows, sem­i­nars, and retreats are every­where. Your neu­roses are big busi­ness. The only down­side is per­haps some­day you’ll become strong enough to leave the tem­ple with your wal­let, so self-helpers are always quick to remind you that you’re not quite cured and they should know — they were once like you. Tony Rob­bins was once like me? Is it self-help or is it some­one in a book or on tele­vi­sion inform­ing you as to your fucked-up-ness by remind­ing you of all your mor­tal and prac­ti­cal con­cerns that are an inher­ent part of adult­hood in a broke ass coun­try wal­low­ing in credit debt? Is Dr. Phil going to pay your bills? Can you get an Oprah credit card where you can pay off your debt in hugs?! I think they take the facts of life and make them into abnor­mal­i­ties to make sure you always tune in. Amer­ica seems to need a lot of help. Guys, you don’t suf­fer from erec­tile dys­func­tion, the evi­dence is splat­tered all over your key­board, you’re just no longer turned on by your aging wife’s naked body and now need drugs to per­form. Is that the self-help they’re seek­ing? Dr. Phil! Help! Give me some of that corn­pone home spun bull­shit to get me through!